Document management systems have typically provided the infrastructure for document collaboration between professionals, particularly in corporations and the legal industry, and in other areas where a managing author, who maybe the originating author, of a document needs to keep control over the evolution of the document, e.g., from original document to final document. In recent years document management systems have been extending their functionality to encompass even more aspects of document collaboration, for example, including a workflow system to notify collaborators of the progress of work on any given document. Nevertheless, despite this progress, document management systems do not provide for incorporating the individual changes proposed by different collaborators into the managing author's document. This means that if person A wishes to have a document reviewed by persons B and C, once persons B and C have reviewed the file and suggested changes to it, person A is still left with the problem of incorporating those changes into the original document.
There have been several approaches to solving the above problem. One approach uses a synchronous writing system in which all authors can interactively change the original document. However, linking computers to enable truly synchronous writing, with any level of usefulness, is fraught with difficulties, such as document locking and access rights.
It is known in the prior art to have a system in which an original document is replicated and the replicas sent to the contributing authors. A contributing author edits the replica and sends the edited replica back to the originating author. A consolidated markup document is created in which, paragraph by paragraph, the original paragraph is displayed along with the corresponding edited replica paragraph from each contributing author. The originating author then selects which of the edits will be included in the final document. A consolidation procedure then removes the duplicate paragraphs from the consolidated document and produces a final document.
There are several problems with the prior art approach. First, the final document, without the duplication, cannot be viewed until after the originating author has made all his/her selections. Thus the originating author cannot see the final document as it evolves from the original, i.e., as changes are made. Second, as different versions of word processing software or even different word processing programs may be used by the collaborators, format corruption can occur. Third, the entire edited replica is sent back to the managing author rather than just the changes, hence increasing the response file size with unnecessary information.
In addition, the prior art uses the conventional methods, e.g., e-mail, to transfer documents to and from the collaborators, particularly collaborators communicating remotely, e.g., over the Internet. Unfortunately, these conventional methods have both security, control, and ease-of-use problems. For example, in order to seek revisions to a document, a managing author removes a document from the document management system, and sends it to the collaborators, either by e-mailing it or posting it on a web portal. Removing the document from the secured and controlled environment of document management system for editing, defeats the purpose of using such a system. This process exposes not only sensitive data, e.g., revision history, to the perils of e-mail and the Internet, but the originating author can easily lose track of files and their versions, because they are not in the DMS.
Therefore there is a need for document collaboration techniques, which provide, among other features, improved security and control of a document, when the document is modified by remote contributors over a communications network, especially a network with public access such as the Internet. In addition, there is a need for improved techniques for determining a response and incorporating the changes from the response into the original document.